2022-04 Status Update

on 2022-05-03 in status-update

Contributions ¶

guixrus ¶

As mentioned earlier, I tried to lint only guixrus packages. But I failed because guix considered that guile script to be part of the channel. I fixed the issue by making it an executable. I went full guile this time and made the linter not use shell at all. This way, we won’t have to append all guixrus packages to command line args, as mentioned in last post.

I was asked to be added to authorized commiters' list of guixrus. From now on, I can review and apply patches to guixrus.

I incorrectly added the fingerprint of my public key to .guix-authorization of guixrus, and had to fix it. guix expects fingerprint of the signing (sub)key instead. This is why I admire guix design. Even if someone manages to push (possibly malicious) commits to master, their commits will be rejected by guix package manager due to absence of an authorized signature.

Pulling from official guix channel always works. I wanted the same for guixrus. I created a build job that tests whether guix is able to pull and build guixrus from its latest commit. This will make guixrus more reliable. We are also working a peer review process to make sure that commits to master don’t break the channel.

I packaged hut for guixrus while working on a more complete upstream package. The hut guixrus package will eventually be removed when it’s in upstream.

guix ¶

As mentioned above, I packaged hut for guix. This will also allow sourcehut guix build image users to seamlessly interact with sourcehut services and resources.

Projects ¶

builds.sr.ht-reactos ¶

Well, this project was a fiasco. Started working on it thinking it’d be simpler to get it working as ReactOS is being developed for two decades now. Only setting up an SSH server is what’s missing; I thought. Fast forward a few days and I found myself trying to download packages from archaic Cygwin distribution mirrors (since newer, official repository has stopped supporting ROS’s architecture) just to be able to get required programs and build openssh server. I encountered fatal kernel panics while building it. Saw the infamous BSOD after a long time and lost motivation to work on it.

iou ¶

I stopped working on IOU (a shared e2ee ledger), after deciding to focus on prior projects first. I will probably revisit it once I complete pending projects.

Conclusion ¶

I replaced PulseAudio and JACK with Pipewire. It took me 3 days to understand (superficially) how it works and get things right. But the efforts are worth it. I can now effortlessly play music using a MIDI keyboard with very low latency while watching to a video online. Pipewire is justifiably all the rage in linux audio.

I tried learning LaTeX for the third time. This time, enough to be able to author some documents for my wife. I also dipped my toes into groff as an alternative to LaTeX. I couldn’t find an easy way to interpolate said LaTeX and groff documents with external data. They seem to be formats good to author documents, and not templates. We fell back to using handlebars and HTML to template and author said documents respectively.

This month was me biting off more than I could chew. I was on a workation the whole month. There isn’t much to share since there wasn’t much done. Stay tuned for the next month. Peace.

I welcome your feedback or constructive criticism to contact@dhruvin.dev.